Saturday, April 02, 2005

I found some cool websites that talk about the hidden gems inside DVD movies, computer programs, video games, etc that was pretty interesting. The site that seems to be arranged the easiest for navigation is Egg Heaven 2000. I remember when we still used Word 97 at work and heard about one of the eggs there. I tried it out and was so delighted when it showed up, that I think I ran around and told half the office about it.

I slip stuff into my books all the time. Mostly they're inside jokes that would be almost impossible to pick up for anyone who wasn't part of the group who knew about it. And the sad thing is, I've forgotten some of them already. So for the few people who read this blog, here are the jokes that I can remember from my books.

Possible Spoiler Alert: Don't read farther if you don't want to know details from my books.***********Ravyn's Flight: This book did not originally have an epilogue. That was added on request from my editor about 6 months after I'd finished the book. It was obvious that I was going to have to put Ravyn and Damon's baby in there, but what was I going to name him? About this same time, a writing buddy of mine was threatening to kill off two characters from her book that I really liked. While I was sitting at the computer trying to come up with names for the baby, I had a sudden thought. What if I made the characters my friend wanted to kill off Damon's maternal grandparents? And what if I named Ravyn and Damon's son after one of those characters? I found this to be vastly amusing and did it. And so Cameron Brody was christianed.

The characters? Cam and Patty from Gennita Low's "Into Danger."

The Power of Two: The jokes here are really inside, although if you read the dedication page in the front, you can figure out that Mel and Maria, the two hackers who help Cai search for news of Jake in chapter two, were named after friends of mine who read through the book for me.

The other joke appears in chapter 2 as well. When Jake is telling Cai about the fight between the wreckers and his Special Forces team, he mentions "PK" and Cai remembers something about the man and a bet he made. I work for an airline. One of the guys I talked with used to work on the ramp--until he drove a baggage loader into the side of a 747. His nickname? Plane Killer, which was quickly shortened to PK. The story I tell in TPOT is loosely based on the story he tells about that event. Very loosely.

I think there may have been a few other things I did in TPOT, but I can't remember them. :-(

Through a Crimson Veil: I haven't done revisions to this book yet so these jokes may not make it into the final version.

There's a nightclub called the "Crimson Jim" that my hero, Conor, goes to in order to get information. The club got it's name because one of the tech writers I work with thought this book should be titled "Crimson Jim." Yep, you guessed it, his name is Jim.

Second joke involves the same Tech Writer. He asked me to put this one in the book. The Evil Twin Brewery is an enterprise he and his friend dreamed up. In one of the chapters, I show Conor picking at a label on a bottle of beer that came from this brewery.

Third joke involves a secondary character. Nat--no last name. Nat = Gnat from TPOT. (Not the same man at all, but more of an homage to my original Gnat. He spent 6 hours talking to me on a drive to Chicago, and if this had been my world, I probably would have written his story. His heroine made an appearance in TPOT too, although only for about a paragraph.)

There are more jokes in this book, including a huge one that I'll never reveal, not even after being plied with large amounts of alcohol. To tease some more, my two writing buddies picked up on it right away and roared hysterically.

But like I said, there are no guarantees that anything I slipped into this book will make it to the final version. I'm still waiting for my revision letter and they just might all get edited out. I should actually make a list of all the things I slip into my stories because I really don't remember them all even a few months later. Especially if I added them while I was deep in deadline dementia. I've already put a couple of things in my RF spin off book, although I might take one of them out myself.